The United Nations has adopted a harsh policy in an attempt to move people to higher ground
Chris McGreal
A United Nations strategy of withholding aid from flood-stricken towns and villages in Mozambique in an attempt to pressure residents to move to refugee camps has left thousands of people desperate for clean drinking water and food, and at risk of disease.
The UN fears that with more heavy rains forecast over the next two days, floods could again swallow up areas hit by the torrent of water that swept down the Limpopo and Save rivers 10 days ago. It wants people to move to camps on higher ground.
But the policy is punishing the residents of towns such as Chokwe, where thousands of people who survived the earlier flood in trees and on roofs are refusing to abandon their homes.
The UN and aid agencies are concentrating aid on a refugee camp at Chaquelan, 40km from Chokwe. But the town only got its first food on Monday. And while the camp has three water purification plants, none has been delivered to Chokwe even though the scorching summer sun has returned and the only available water is from stagnant pools, some contaminated with human corpses.
At the Catholic church, hundreds of mothers queued with their young children to see two doctors giving rehydration fluid, and treatment for malaria and tuberculosis. The babies’ desperate cries were mixed with ominous coughs. Some of the children begged for water. The mothers faced the awful choice of ignoring the pleas or quenching their babies’ thirst with the filthy remnants of the flood.
The torrent of water that swept through the town 10 days ago has left a tidemark about 2,7m high on the walls of the church, which was home to many of Chokwe’s Aids sufferers before the floods. The floor is thick with mud.
In the corridor, a young girl lies on a reed mat awaiting treatment for malaria. Nearby, volunteers wash the mud from packets of medicines. Bandages caked in filth are laid out in the sun to dry alongside the tuberculosis records.
One of the doctors, Sister Elisa Verdu, despairs at the lack of assistance to Chokwe even though Mozambique is now the target of the biggest foreign aid airlift in Africa since the Rwanda crisis six years ago.
“There are a lot of people here with malaria. We don’t even have enough of the basic medicines. We don’t have drinking water. There’s no food. There’s nothing. No one has come here,” she said.
The price of food has risen several times over. Without clean water, the threat of disease is as great as in the camps. Stagnant pools of water all over the town provide a haven for mosquitoes.
The UN special envoy, Ross Mountain, is overseeing the policy of concentrating assistance on camps which he says house 250 000 refugees.
‘We have pleaded with people not to go back to their homes. If there is more flooding they will have to be rescued again and that will take resources away from getting food and water to people who need it. I don’t know what else we can do,” he said.
The World Food Programme (WFP)finally delivered two tonnes of maize to Chokwe on Monday. But WFP official Lindsey Davis conceded that there were no plans to despatch water or purification equipment to the town.
Felix Nacimiento is one of the diehards refusing to leave Chokwe. He escaped being swept away by the flash flood by climbing on to the roof of a school, where he stayed for five days.
Nacimiento sits next to a large pool of flood water carefully washing the thick mud from each piece of a dismantled fan. “We survived the floods. Why should we leave now?” he said. “Nothing will make me leave, even another flood. I will just climb up again, but this time I will remember to take some food.”
Nacimiento’s house was shin-deep in the mire when the waters receded. He shovelled out the dirt, washed the walls as best he could and laid out his furniture on the road to dry.
“Everything is destroyed in this town. Look at the school. They were repairing it and now all that work is wasted,” he said.
The water tore down buildings and uprooted telegraph poles before driving them through walls. Part of the town is still under water, and the fields which fed many of its 60 000 residents have turned to marsh.
A little way from the school, a corpse lies in the middle of the street. Someone has covered it with leaves. In other parts of the town, the dead have been buried in shallow roadside graves, but the unmistakable stench of rotting bodies still wafts from some of the remaining pools of flood water.
Reconstruction will take a while. The centre of the town was badly looted, partly by people desperate for food after the flood subsided and partly by thieves taking advantage of the chaos to cart off anything of value. There is considerable anger among some residents at what they call “the pirates” – young men who moved about in boats during the flood robbing private houses.
Just about the only signs of contentment came from a couple of pigs on the loose, rooting in the sodden grass.